Mike Foltynewicz focusing on his four-seam fastball

VIERA, Fla. — The Astros pitching prospect with the perhaps best fastball on this side of Florida is going to be throwing a little differently this season.

No need for panic: Mike Foltynewicz will still throw a lot of heat. But a few days ago, he had his two-seam fastball taken away.

The pitch has good movement, but the 22-year-old needs to focus more on his four-seamer — the triple-digit pitch that’s a tease for fans right now, because Foltynewicz still needs some Class AAA seasoning.

There’s little remorse for the two-seamer, which isn’t the only change Foltynewicz is making.

“The people who throw sinkers are people that can’t throw fastballs,” Astros pitching coach Brent Strom said, with some embellishment. “Foltynewicz throws 98 mph. Now if that’s not the definition of a fastball, I don’t know what is.”

“A lot of the Tommy John (surgeries) that you’re reading about, and one of the things that we’re going to address with the minor league pitching coaches in Houston, is we have to keep our hand inside our elbow as we’re driving a ball in a straight line,” Strom said.

Even besides the potential for injury, the two-seamer wasn’t coming out of the same throwing slot as Foltynewicz’s four-seamer.

The 6-4 Foltynewicz, or Folty for short, was the Astros’ first-round draft pick in 2010 out of high school in Illiniois, at No. 19. He threw a slider and a curveball then, but the Astros asked him to focus on one pitch to start off his pro career.

The slider came back last year, but midseason elbow soreness that Foltynewicz had never previously dealt with made him table it again, presumably for a while.

The tandem pitching system the Astros employ in the minors — where two starting pitchers share the majority of the day’s work — might have had an ill effect on the elbow separately or in conjunction with the slider, but it’s impossible to tell.

“My whole life has been on a five day rotation and that’s all it was, that’s all it’s been,” Foltynewicz said. “Throwing in a piggy-back system and throwing one more day of rest, I couldn’t tell you what the issue was, but I definitely was a little sore. I feel good now, I feel great.”

The curveball that Foltynewicz is going to throw is itself a new pitch: a spike curve. Many people might refer to the pitch as a knuckle curve, although Strom says that a true knuckle curve is different.

To throw a conventional curveball, the index and middle fingers are placed along the seams. The spike curve involves raising the index finger so that the knuckle is visually sticking up, and the pitch is in effect powered by the middle finger alone.

Strom looks at Sandy Koufax as a mentor, and this is Koufax-approved thinking.

“The most powerful finger on the hand is the middle finger,” Strom said. “So what it does, it takes the index finger out of the equation. ‘Cause the curveball, the best curveball — which I’ve heard from Koufax — are thrown between the middle finger and the ring finger. The thumb is a detriment and the index finger is a detriment in terms of rotation of the ball.

“The biggest problem young pitchers have, and not just young pitchers, they try and manipulate the shape of the ball. They try and shape it with their hand with their body as opposed to letting the rotation of the ball make the break.”

Foltynewicz said the pitch is coming along well. His ultimate focus, no matter what pitch he’s throwing, is to stop giving out free passes.

Foltynewicz hears people wonder why it’s been hard to minimize walks, or why he hasn’t struck out even more batters than he has. Last year, he fanned 95 and walked 52 in 103 1/3 innings for Class AA Corpus Christi, where he spent most of the season. He made 23 appearances, all but seven starts.

Throwing a fastball as hard as Foltynewicz can, and throwing it accurately, isn’t easily understood for someone who isn’t able to throw that hard.

“People don’t realize that (difficulty),” Foltynewicz said of locating a pitch that fast. “If you throw that hard, walks are going to happen. Gary Ruby, the Double-A pitching coach, he said, ‘Walks are going to come.’ And it is hard to control a fastball.”

But Foltynewicz is working every day to do so.

“That’s kind of the big thing that’s holding me back in my opinion,” Foltynewicz said. “I’ve kind of heard it from a few coaches here and there, to get the walks down.

“The last couple years I’ve been just trying to huck the ball by people. Sometimes I just wanted to rear back and throw it by people. I realize — everyone in baseball right now can hit a fastball. Don’t matter how hard, don’t matter where location is.”

Foltynewicz also now thinks more about his defense behind him than he used to. That by pitching in the zone, and pitching to contact potentially, he keeps his infielders sharp — and at the Class AA level, defenses are pretty good.

It’d be hard for any manager to watch Foltynewicz throw and not think, just momentarily, how impressive he’d be in a bullpen, maybe as a closer, right now.

But Foltynewicz envisions himself in a rotation. He’ll do what the team wants, as most any prospect would, but he’d love the chance to start.

“A lot of people have their opinions on what they should have you do,” said Foltynewicz, who pitched two innings in relief on Wednesday, allowing two singles but no runs and striking out the side in the eighth. “But in my mind, I know that I’m a starter, I prepared to be a starter. I’ve been one my whole life, and I know I can be a pretty good one if I get the chance to.”

The Astros agree.

“As you go along, those decisions are something that will pretty much decide themselves,” manager Bo Porter said. “I think right now he’s a starting pitcher. We see him as a starting pitcher.”